#jyutping

I got recommended this keyboard App called TypeDuck🦆by anwar @ Insta that you may like to check out! (If you haven't heard of, or aren't already using, that is!)

Even though I have yet to try it (long story involving my phone being wonky so I can't install this for myself, for now), cantonese4parents @ Insta already has, and it's available on Playstore, so I'd expect it has been vetted safe enough!

Apparently if you use this keyboard to type out in 粵拼 Jyutping (Cantonese Romanisation, equivalent to Mandarin's Pinyin system), it will show you not only the Jyutping spelling but also the English meaning alongside the 漢字 Chinese characters! ↓

Besides English, it apparently supports some less common language translations like “Hindi, Nepali and Urdu” (quoting from their website) too.

Very useful I think, for anyone who's not good at recognising/mapping the 漢字 to the 粵拼 yet! 😺

Wonder if this counts as transformative work.

Progress:

2 files converted to MP4 format. (I stopped there because one of the media players on the computer I was using told me it couldn't read the audio in that format. Checked with my sister, just heard it works fine for her.)

8 (?) songs transcribed over the last 8-ish years, there might be more I haven't done a comprehensive search of my text files/notes. Today I put the jyutping tone numbers in the two songs I converted so far. Those seem to be the only ones I didn't add tone numbers to.

Goal: I have 8 VCDs worth of files, each has 15-20 songs on them.

San nin faai lok!

May the Year of the Water Tiger give you the vigour of a dragon & the fierceness of a tiger!

Well, today, after *cough* years of absence, I clicked onto the same website again! Hey, my course is still there! And look, it seems that... 3.4k people have used it?? More than 50 in the last month alone? WTF???? 

It’s not the most popular Cantonese class on there. But it *is* the most popular Cantonese Jyutping, and if you take both categories together, it’s like, 5th.

🇭🇰🇲🇴 → 🥮

I just remembered the existence of the 🥮 mooncake emoji. Going to use it to denote Cantonese 粵拼 (Jyutping — Cantonese Romanisation) in my language posts henceforth.

I think it's perfect to represent Cantonese too, because there's a pun in 「月」 from 月餅 (🥮 jyut⁶ beng²) — the Cantonese pronunciation for "mooncake” and 「粵」 from 粵語 (🥮 jyut⁶ jyu⁵) — a term for the Cantonese topolect.

Frankly, I have always been a little uncomfortable with using region flags' emoji to represent or denote what languages I speak/am writing/am learning, because the usage of region flags can be so…politically charged — not that anyone has given me grief for using flags' emoji so far — and in the case of the Cantonese I am self-learning, it's not exactly the same as the Cantonese from 🇭🇰 Hong Kong or 🇲🇴 Macau either, so to use those regions' flags seems inaccurate to me.

But because the language community seems to have generally embraced using flags' emoji to represent languages, and I couldn't think of anything better to use before, I mostly went along with it, until now that is!

I had the same dilemma with Mandarin, but gleefully had the brainwave to use the 🀄 mahjong emoji for a while now, and I think it turned out a fortuitous choice!

Going to be using more neutral emoji to denote the other languages, English (🇬🇧 → 🎩 top hat) and Japanese (🇯🇵 → 🍙 onigiri) as well; Mandarin will remain the same 🀄 mahjong emoji.

And I thought a post like this (similar to a post on Zhùyīn done by linghxr) may be of interest to some.

Edited: 10 Sep 2023

This post has gotten a little popular lately and on scrutinizing my own post again, I've come to the conclusion that I had made some mistakes in my given character examples.

Amended now. Namely, 「唔」 and 「龍」 have now been swapped over in the examples.

「唔」 is really the “3-parts”, and 「龍」 is indeed a “2-parts” character! Amendments are reflected in orange.

What (and who) is Cāngjié?

For those who may not know, Cāngjié is another way to input 漢字/汉字 (Hànzì — Chinese characters). It is way less popular than Pinyin (or even Zhuyin) but it still has its fans, and has a few advantages over the other two.

Cāngjié is also the name of the mythical figure in Chinese legend who is said to have been the inventor of 漢字/汉字, for which Cāngjié (the input system) was named after.

Would I recommend it?

Yes, if you think you have already acquired a good (enough) understanding of 漢字/汉字, and/or just like a new challenge.

(TL;DR at the end)

Why am I learning Cāngjié (and why you may like to, too)?

1. Mostly for fun.

Have long been intrigued by both Cāngjié and Zhùyīn, and since I finally mustered up the courage to tackle Zhùyīn not too long ago, I thought I'd finally give Cāngjié a try.

While learning Cāngjié does require more effort than learning Pinyin or Zhuyin, it can also be really fun! Inputting 漢字/汉字 with the Cāngjié method is almost like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

The euphoria derived from figuring out and piecing together the radicals that make up a word is something that learning Jyutping (Cantonese equivalent of Pinyin), Pinyin or Zhuyin can't quite match.

And while I know I'll never be as adept with Cāngjié — my knowledge of 漢字/汉字 is nowhere near good enough to ever use Cāngjié efficiently — as I do Jyutping or Pinyin (or to some extent, Zhuyin), it'll still be fun to use Cāngjié every once in a while!

2. Helps with thinking and typing in Chinese.

The upshot of relying too much on using Jyutping/Pinyin/Zhuyin is, I'd tend to think in Roman letters or ㄅㄆㄇㄈ before I'd even think about the actual 漢字/汉字.

But with Cāngjié, because it's based on knowing radicals and joining them together to form actual characters, it'll encourage thinking of 漢字/汉字 first, so I think that would help some with 漢字/汉字 memory retention.

Now you may be thinking, why not just you know, practise actually writing then? That is the tried and proven method to better remember 漢字/汉字 after all?

Yes, of course I can do that — and am doing so occasionally — but we live in a digital age now, and the probability and opportunity to type things out is much higher than actually writing stuff by hand.

The idea here is, more looking to think of and envision characters fully in my head, and trying to lessen over-reliance on Jyutping/Pinyin/Zhuyin.

And this is where I find Cāngjié can be useful, which leads to my next point…

3. Haunted by “What if” scenario.

What if there comes a day (however improbable) where I'm presented with only a Cāngjié keyboard to use for typing Chinese? It has happened with Zhùyīn for me!

That means, no Pinyin or Zhuyin keyboards, no Handwriting tools/touchscreens to write with fingers/mouse, no speech-to-text, and no option to copy-and-paste characters from somewhere else either! What then?

4. Able to type without knowing pronunciation, and with more accuracy.

Cāngjié is shape-based. Unlike Jyutping/Pinyin/Zhuyin, where you have to know what a character sounds like before you can type it out, with Cāngjié, you can type out (again assuming no Handwriting or other tools available) characters without needing to know how to pronounce them at all.

With shape-based typing, you'd also get more accurate hits in the first few 漢字/汉字 that show up, versus sound-based methods like Pinyin where for e.g., typing out “wan” will get you a whole list under the same sound and you may have to scroll through a whole lot to get the exact “wan” you need.

You can also type both Traditional and Simplified characters without having to toggle something or switch keyboards.

So how does one begin learning Cāngjié?

Hong Kong hotel offers dim sum cart for dogs

上湯鵪鶉蛋 (soeng6 tong1 am1 seon4 daan2)

quail egg in consommé

鱈魚花膠卷 (syut3 jyu2 faa1 gaau1 gyun2)

cod fish maw roll

羊奶燉雞柳 (joeng4 naai5 dan6 gai1 lau5)

shredded chicken stewed in goat's milk

鴨肉多春魚 (aap3 juk6 do1 ceon1 jyu2)

duck meat with (some kind of) smelt fish

籠蒸滋味球 (lung4 zing1 zi1 mei6 kau4)